How outraged you can get about Michael Fabricant depends entirely on the degree to which you judge the Conservative member for Lichfield to be part of what is conveniently referred to as the establishment. Fabricant looks like he should be in an establishment, certainly, which may account for the confusion. But whether someone who has spent decades going to such outlandish lengths to make himself appear preposterous can seriously be imagined to have any real power or influence is a debate so open and shut that even he might contrive to find himself on the right side of it.

For those with better things to do than immerse themselves in the increasingly recycled waters of Twitter – believed to have passed 700 times though the kidneys of the website – the issue is this: at around midnight on Thursday, Fabricant fired off a tweet in apparent reference to a Channel 4 News debate between the journalists and authors Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Rod Liddle. He could never appear on a discussion programme with Ms Alibhai-Brown, Fabricant explained (presumably throwing countless telly researchers' plans for Socratic dialogue into disarray). "I would either end up having a brain haemorrhage," he continued, "or by punching her in the throat."

Can I order the brain haemorrhage, please? With a side of … but no. No. That way total self-abasement lies. While the knee-jerk response might be to come up with a version of Private Eye's brilliant headline verdict on Rupert Murdoch's diagnosis with prostate cancer some years ago – "Cancer has Murdoch" – the motivation for honking "Brain haemorrhage has a Michael Fabricant" should really have evaporated before you'd worked out where in haemorrhage that eye-catching double r sits.

For what minuscule amount it's worth, I would deselect Fabricant for this, despite the increasingly poignant range of non-apology apologies and arse-coverings he offered asFriday progressed. And if Michael's local Conservative association does not take this opportunity to reverse a decision that can only have been made as a drunken dare in the early 1990s, then they must be judged even more stupid than, in an ideal world, they already would be.

But I can't help feeling it would be preferable if this process could take its course without people somehow pretending that Mr Fabricant is any sort of meaningful voice of the establishment – or, indeed, that a chap of his tedious idiosyncrasies could illustrate the "normalisation" of anything, from violence against women to the notion that we get the so-called lawmakers we deserve.

He is an MP, yes, and like the majority of his colleagues, good and bad, he draws a fine salary, particularly considering that the role effectively amounts to walking into whichever room you're told a few times a week during term, and pretending you're something other than a usually very poorly performing social worker.

And until some earlier Twittishness saw him relieved of the post, it is indeed the case that Fabricant was vice-chairman of the Conservative party. But that appointment can only ever have been a satirical act – or if it weren't, we should thank whichever Tory imbecile reverted to type and picked him, as they have now served up a reminder of the militantly thick tendency which is believed to have infiltrated the party in the 1970s, Trojan horse style, and which has resisted every quarter-arsed attempt to purge it from its ranks ever since. The only thing Michael Fabricant could reasonably be vice-chairman of is the steering committee of Nurse Ratched's ward fete.

So whether any of the above is the same as wielding a scintilla of power or real influence over anyone but the already terminally idiotic is deeply debatable. To elevate the matter into a parlour game, can you can conceive of any establishment in which Fabricant could realistically play a significant part? An 18th-century Mittel-European "travelling show", if we may euphemise for a moment. Or the great and the good of "gentle comedy", where "gentle" has always been a synonym for "no". Or, perhaps, just where he finds himself – in the rolling auto-parody of extra-governmental Westminster politics.

On the one hand, then, our hero is one of the many MPs for that most over-represented of constituencies: dreary dullards so bereft of anything resembling a "character" that they imagine bores such as Mr Fabricant to be one. I'm not sure they deserve our sympathy more than our condemnation; though clearly they should be ignored in the manner of all legends in their own lunchtime.

On the other, it is an effort of will to see Fabricant as representative of anything, except the more socially backward members of the Lichfield Conservative association. He is a man of almost unparalleled irrelevance. His only purpose is to debunk that old nonsense that if you stick around long enough, anyone becomes a national treasure. If he was on the verge of becoming a "national treasure" to the minuscule percentage of the nation who could identify him by name were they shown a picture of him, this latest episode will have reminded them that there really are bigger and better idiots in public life to get behind.